What It Takes to Open a Bar in Baghdad

Welcome to the Baghdad Country Club, founded in the middle of the war zone of 2006 Iraq, where even the beer runs were a matter of life and death

An Iraqi man carries cases of beer outside of one of Baghdad's few alcohol shops / Reuters

Iraqis have a word, barra,
which means "out there," and for those lucky enough to be inside the
Green Zone came to mean the rest of Baghdad, the bedlam beyond the
T-walls. As the insurgency reached fever pitch in 2006, Iraqis and
Americans alike were terrified that barra would not stay out there but
come in here, that the war would breach the perimeter, that the place
would collapse and there would be a mad scramble to evacuate, like
Saigon in '75.

The Baghdad Country Club, the only authentic bar
and restaurant in Baghdad's Green Zone, was one place where people could
forget about barra for a moment. Anyone -- mercenaries and
diplomats, contractors and peacekeepers, aid workers and Iraqis -- could
walk in, get dinner, open a decent bottle of Bordeaux, and light a
cigar from the humidor to go with it. Patrons would check their weapons
in a safe, like coats in a coatroom, and leave the war behind as they
wandered past a sign that read:

BAGHDAD COUNTRY CLUB

NO GUNS, NO AMMUNITION, NO GRENADES, NO FLASH BANGS, NO KNIVES--NO EXCEPTIONS!

To
keep the bar adequately stocked, the BCC's owner James -- a British
ex-paratrooper turned security contractor who asked that I use his first
name only, due to concerns that his past ventures in Iraq might affect
his current work there (the Baghdad Country Club was a place where many
people liked to recreate, but few later desired to admit they had) --
and his fixer Ajax had to venture out there regularly. To cross hostile
roads in vehicles laden with liquor, James would trade his suit for
overalls and body armor, his Glock tucked into his ops vest, an M-4 in
the passenger seat, a bag of cash stashed in the back. Fatalism came
easy in a place with so many fatalities -- if today's your day, it's
your day, James thought whenever he eased behind the wheel.

Beer
for the BCC was a loss leader: It had to be in the bar, but the
extraordinary logistics to obtain it were bad for the bottom line.
That's because beer came from downtown. The volume meant size, and size
meant you were a target, winding through Baghdad's warren of confusing
streets in an open truck. Proper security, however, disappeared in the
face of overwhelming demand.

James couldn't go anywhere near the
area himself, so Ajax was in charge of that department, even though Ajax
was Sunni, which put him at great personal risk in Shia territory. "But
I knew my way around down there," he says. "I could get what we
needed." He knew all the principals in the local booze business, having
worked at Habur Gate, the border checkpoint where deliveries from Turkey
arrived. "I had the whole supply chain down, man!"

For the first
beer run, Ajax stacked an SUV with 20 cases. It was gone within the
hour. James called Ajax as he was driving home.

"Can you head back downtown?" he asked. "We're empty."

Ajax
knew he needed a bigger car. He took his Jeep Cherokee, tinted the
windows, and removed the backseats to double the load capacity. The
vehicle still wasn't big enough. By the time Ajax upgraded to multi-axle
trucks, the violence was worsening. This created an additional problem,
since larger vehicles couldn't be armored. Sometimes Ajax stationed a
guy with an AK-47 amid the beer, hidden in a makeshift turret assembled
from cases of Carlsberg or Sapporo. His job was to light up attackers,
but Ajax knew he was usually drunk by the time they got moving.

A
month after the bar opened, just before Ramadan, some emissaries from
the Shiite Mahdi Army alerted Ajax that the holiday would be an
unfriendly time downtown. Realizing that they wouldn't be able to
restock for a month, Ajax and James mounted nonstop supply missions,
bringing in 6,000 cases of beer. It filled the BCC's storage rooms and
the giant containers outside and then had to be piled on the roof until
the structure bowed. Apache pilots rerouted their flights over the bar
so they could check out the stash.

It might have been the most
hazardous beer procurement process in the world at the time, which is
why it drove James nuts when Green Zone guys in clean pressed khakis
complained about availability or pricing like they were in a grocery
store back in New Jersey. "People could get killed for your fucking
Corona Light," he'd tell people at the bar. One day, a contractor
suggested to James that he could get beer cheaper himself. "Oh sure,"
James said. "Go ahead and drive to Sadr City. See if you can find the
warehouse. Make sure you're armored and locked and loaded, because if
anyone sees you, you're fucking done, mate."

James himself often
braved the deadly Route Irish to pick up shipments of spirits from
Ahmed, a businessmen out at the airport who supplied him with most of
his liquor. The road was a target for snipers and car bombs, resulting
in trigger-happy U.S. military personnel and mercenaries. A typical
private security detail cost basis, with a heavily armored airport
pickup of one passenger, was five grand. James had done many such
contracted Baghdad Airport trips himself. Now he was routinely making
the drive in an unarmored vehicle, often alone.

Ajax was a
drinker who liked to stay up all night, a combination that left James in
lurch most mornings. In addition to IEDs and insurgents, Route Irish
had commuter traffic. James really wanted to beat that traffic. Any idle
moments stalled in gridlock on the pitted blacktop made you a mark. By
6:30 a.m., he'd have a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other,
spend 10 minutes making futile calls to Ajax's voice mail, and then ease
one of the jeeps out of the driveway himself. People thought James was
reckless, hitting Route Irish solo and soft skinned. But he preferred
going low profile, and he always double-checked the spare magazines and
smoke grenades in his plate carrier as he left Checkpoint 12 heading
west, toward the airport.

Route Irish was once a grand motorway
though a bourgeois neighborhood, lined with palms. Now the road was
extremely dangerous: Drivers were targets. James would hammer up it,
hoping to make the seven miles in ten minutes. Such speed was possible
but rare. Instead, the drive was often several harrowing hours, with
military call signs barreling the wrong way through wreckage to dodge
firefights against insurgents, who were known to release signal pigeons
from nearby rooftops.

James's little jeep looked like Iraqi
traffic, so he also had to worry about being fired upon by American
soldiers or contractors. They tended to be quick with warning shots, and
non-warning shots soon thereafter, when any vehicle came within 100
yards. Now on the other end of coalition military muzzles and bad
attitudes, James understood Iraqis' resentment. But having been a
military contractor himself, he also understood the fear that goes with
wearing a bull's eye. The whole thing was a mess. And here he was,
threading the needle every other day to pick up some Dewar's.

As
he drove, James would blast music to distract himself, usually whatever
was on Armed Forces radio. Everyone had lost friends on that road. He'd
felt the pressure sucked out of the air by massive explosions and braced
for the blast that followed. Once he'd hit the T-walls of Checkpoint 1,
the gateway to the relative security of the airport, he'd let go a sigh
of relief, but even that wasn't quite safe. He'd seen car bombs go off
right at the checkpoint, and he'd jumped out to assist, only to find
people he knew on the ground, too far gone for a medic.

Once
through the entrance, James would show up at Ahmed's compound, jittery
smoke in hand. Then he'd stack up his supply and head back out through
the checkpoint for the return trip.

This piece is an excerpt from
"Baghdad Country Club" by Joshuah Bearman. The full story is available from The Atavist for the Kindle, the iPad/iPhone, and other
outlets via The Atavist website.

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Joshuah Bearman has written for Rolling Stone, Harper's, Wired, McSweeney's, the New York Times Magazine, and is a contributor to This American Life. He is currently working on his first book, St. Croix, a memoir